ORGANIC DEPENDENCE AND DISEASE 
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plant world ; a division wliicli cuts so deep it has never been 
bridged nor can be. Independence and dependence were 
established as the elemental and essential partition of the 
kingdom of life. 
8. Individual and locomotive independence then, it would 
seem, has been the major function and prime determining 
factor in the progress of life. We find even in the plant 
world, fettered as it is, the effort to get free or to develop 
along the lines of the animals as shown in the development 
of specialized functions to which we have referred. But 
the plants never have got free. Their dependence is incur- 
able under Nature’s codex. All progress in life, as 
reckoned in terms of man, has come through independence 
and through those lines of animal life in which independ- 
ence has been maintained at any cost. It is safe to say that 
none of the physical ancestors of man, however remote the 
direct line may have run, have ever surrendered their phys- 
ical independence or suffered essential modification through 
perturbation of their normal activities. 
9. Disease, then, in its broadest sense, so far as it means 
a disturbance of normal living, is a synonym of abnormal 
living ; that is, of any life that has departed from the primi- 
tive impulse to a consistent, coordinated and fully com- 
petent physiology. 
10. If dependence has affected and sealed the fate of one 
great division of the Kingdom of Life, so that it is and 
must remain subsidiary to the larger purposes of nature, 
dependence also has entered upon, invaded and degenerated 
a very large part, indeed, probably the major part of 
the other, the animal world. Here it seems to us that 
the dependent condition thus enforced is of a different or- 
der of quality than the aboriginal dependence of the plant 
world. Dependent races of animals have sought or accepted 
dependence as an easier mode of living, either waiting upon 
the unconscious forces of Nature, waves and winds, or on 
the normal activities of other animals. Such dependence 
